If there ever was a case of "don't comment unless you've RTFA" this it: people extrapolating their viewpoint on a list of 700 things from watching 1, 2, 3 ...
At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.
If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.
I’ve reached the point where the problem is more than just the equipment, it’s the culture.
There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera.
You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.
Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.
This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.
>"the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Just to play devils advocate, can't I conclude there is a problem without that problem being the "militarization" of the police force. In other words aren't I allowed to conclude there was a problem prior to the militarization of the police force, and really what we are seeing proliferation of video recordings that are now making us think these acts are new, when the reality is they happened in mass occurred prior to militarization of police...and as scary as it sounds accountability is increasing because of the video?
Then on the extreme end of devils advocate, lets say we all watched 100 videos that made us sick to our stomach...how many millions of police interactions have we not seen that might suggest the bad acts is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall data. Not unlike maybe a few bad actors that have looted or committed arson, or committed murder during the BLM protests, do those acts suggest the entire culture of BLM movement is tainted?
One of the things that really makes me sick about the George Floyd death which doesn't get a lot of attention is that the prosecutors/state attorneys originally swept it under the rug and refused to bring charges. Thank god for the video, even though it didn't stop the act, we all see the tragedy we see the victim we see the cop and attach names and faces...but who knows the names of the prosecutors who watched this video and said "no, nothing wrong here, no charges?" Nameless, faceless people protecting the officers behind the scene enabling offices to act any way they want knowing they will be protected...and maybe if we corrected that problem and officer didn't feel they could act in any fashion they wanted and receive protection perhaps we would see officers act a little differently in the streets.
I've watched 30 clips. ALL of them were 30 second clips with no context. All of them from one Twitter thread as well, so not sure why that was not linked instead.
On the other hand, all of the instances of so-called police brutality with context which I've seen elsewhere occur after the police calmly order the protestors to leave a particular area, or to go home because of a curphew order or something else and the protests refuse in a less-than-calm manner.
My question is this: is the police using force to manage a crowd always unjustified in your view?
As a non American I am not getting this at all. In many US cities/towns sheriff is elected. In all other cases city mayor is elected. How it happens that all those mayors and sheriffs are still in the office if police brutality is such a big issue?
Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?
I did that yesterday, more than 100 of the videos.
Eventually I saw a pattern, surprising since it was common in major cities all across the US and as if there were some single, central training materials. Apparently:
(1) Police are taught to be in control of any contact with a citizen. Recently the police have been taught to act nice initially, but, once it is clear some actual law enforcement is to be involved, be in control.
Being in control can mean that the citizen has been intimidated and made submissive so that they won't resist. Part of this is to demand that a citizen DO some little things, e.g., stand with feet apart, move back 10 feet, or tolerate being falsely accused of something, e.g., "weaving" in the road, being too close to the officer, etc. The officers are looking for things, even trivial, fake things, to object to so that they can object. It's like Captain Sobel in the 101st Airborne training in the series Band of Brothers -- "find some" infractions so that can complain about them and force the soldiers to accept being falsely accused so that they will be more compliant -- the police seem to have borrowed this tactic.
If the citizen does not look submissive, then the officer provokes a defensive reaction from the citizen so that they can arrest the citizen or threaten to arrest them.
Then, finally, maybe arrested, the citizen has been subdued and is submissive, which is what the police wanted to begin with.
(2) The police like to teach citizens, to change their attitude, and do this by hurting them, e.g., hitting them with a club, bending their arms, throwing them to the ground and putting a knee on their neck, spraying them with pepper spray, etc. They regard good police work as meting out "cruel and unusual punishment", with pain and maybe serious injury, without "due process". So, the police want to be absolute dictators on the streets.
(3) In a confrontation with a citizen, the police want some result where they successfully took some law enforcement action, a ticket or an arrest. E.g., in Atlanta, at first they didn't want merely to leave the citizen alone or, if the citizen was drunk, let him call a cab and (ii) later wanted to make sure the citizen was not able just to run away. The reaction to a citizen running away?
"Shoot them and kill them. Gee, they might 'get away'; can't permit that; that would violate due respect for the police; so, shoot the citizen." -- or some such.
(4) The expected, usual approach to an arrest is to throw the citizen to the ground, hold them down with a knee to their neck, their arms behind their back, and put on handcuffs.
From the 100 or so videos I watched, it appeared that (1)-(4) are so standard that they have been taught from some standard source. E.g., in all of that, some semi-bright guy had the idea that it was good to put a knee on a neck, and it appears that that is now standard.
Apparently part of (1)-(4) is the associated support for it from the Blue Line, e.g., police unions, Police Benevolent Associations, liability insurance cities buy for their police, the norm of police sticking together, local prosecutors, DAs, and judges who work daily with police and want to cooperate, politicians who want safe streets, etc. And at times maybe there has been more to police power, e.g., confiscating cash, shakedowns, payoffs, etc.
I'm sure that changing (1)-(4) can be done but won't be easy.
This is a clear attempt to manipulate opinion, I don't know why HN leaves it up. You could watch 100 videos of disgusting malpractices in restaurant kitchens and begin to think you should never eat in a restaurant again. If after watching carefully select and cut videos on a Twitter propaganda account you believe the police has a systemic issue, you're falling for the same trap. It's the same way media manipulate you with their carefully chosen "interviews" with random people on the street.
I watched 10. The first 10, not selected 10. Why do I need to watch 100 to find what is claimed - "brutality"? If there are 7 cases of real police brutality make a list of 7, not 700.
Can we begin with the fact that this isn't even remotely in the same universe as a peer reviewed study? There's nothing to compare it to, there's no data on what the timeline is, there's no meta analysis of the different cases, what sparked the incidents, the outcomes, or how often non-violent confrontations or de-escalations happen, etc.
Basically you're looking at a single specific dataset, like "number of children strangled", and deciding to extrapolate from that whatever you feel like, like "a systemic and perpetual abuse of mothers and babysitters power by evil matriarchs".
Honestly, I credited this crowd with more brains. Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.
The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem.
This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.
I recommend the latest Sam Harris podcast on this subject, he makes a ton of nuanced points that many people miss when talking about "police brutality".
There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.
When one 737 Max crashed, some pointed the finger at the pilots.
When a second one crashed, the focus quickly shifted.
It is a common attitude in aviation that even pilot error is really a systems fault. Perhaps opposing buttons are too close together, or some control requires attention to be diverted at the wrong time, or pilots are allowed to fly too many hours without adequate rest, or plenty of other things that could contribute to predictable human failure.
It seems obvious that we can predict human failure in current policing. If two incidents with a 737 lead to an indefinite grounding, what's the right number for this situation?
In the case of the airplane, grounding does not create a public safety issue. And there are, of course, many alternatives that can keep the overall system up and running in the meantime. The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
The natural follow up to your analogy shows exactly why these protests targeted at police might be a good solution.
A new system, like the design of a whole new plane requires a lot of political will, funding and time. On the other hand, the solution people are more likely to get is minor adjustments to the design of the plane or system to make it compliant, so the 737 Max can fly again, in some capacity.
Changing the demographic of the police forces to eradicate the choke hold of trigger happy white supremacists on it, will take decades. On the other hand, laws for police accountability and monitoring can be enacted faster, and help put the police system back into place in a format that is a bit more functional.
It doesn't solve the core problem. But, it's a start. It makes it so that fewer people will face police brutality for the next few decades, while longer term efforts to reform law enforcement can take hold in the US.
> The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
a 100%. It goes deep into the American conception of good and bad, punishment and rehabilitation.
US police-caused deaths seem to run at the rate of several airliner's worth of people a year. The problem seems to be the exact opposite of a safety culture: there is no systematic review of what happens, what factors led up to it, what could have been done differently. The police routinely lie about events with no consequences, even when contradicted by video or other evidence.
We cannot even get the police to agree that the deaths represent failures: they will usually dig up or even fabricate anything negative about the victim to imply that he or she deserved to die. You can see this happening in the comments here too.
It is not suprising that people want to ground the police.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Its a cycle we already saw so many times, I believe with so many movements asking for rights, that this is "weak men" part creating hard times.
Mexico did a while ago what so many people is asking for, disband a security corp, result? The Zetas.
Why people is ignoring statistics? People kill people of the same race.
Many of that videos is just a bunch of violent people being put as victims by others people agenda. Is like your big brother hits you, then you hit back and just you are punished.
Be careful and thoughtful in your judgments. If possible try to look back in history and search an alike situation outcome.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Your comparison would be more accurate if all humans were law abiding citizens. I don't think you could put blame on pilots if airplanes could sabotage flights at will.
Of course if all humans are law abiding citizens there would be no issue to begin with. I think every society with lower crime has significantly smaller police brutality issue with some rare exceptions like Hong Kong.
I know politics isn't the usual HN topic, but I think this goes beyond politics at this point. Until I saw this list, I had no idea how out of control this situation has gotten here.
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
There needs to be a psychology study done with cops to understand why they act the way they do. I believe there's an underlying problem in how they are trained or something else because police brutality is kind of a global phenomenon. When someone kills or severely hurts the people they are supposed to protect, it seems like there's something else going on. I've been in a few protests and I can easily say that I have never seen more hatred in someone's eyes other than the cops that were beating up people.
There's also a Github repo [1] which was posted a while ago containing various instances of police brutality as well as other sites using said data to better illustrate the problem.
- Less immunity, and discharge without pension for blatant violations, for example being caught on camera hiding a badge, or deliberately bumping into someone to be able to argue that they were "assaulted".
- Longer police traning. A 6-12months is how long you should train to be an unarmed mall security guy. Two or three years for a policeman seems like a minimum if you want qualified officers.
- Federal overview of all police and common frameworks for what is allowed and expected by police officers.
- Only qualified policemen should be allowed to be managers anywhere in the hierarchy (e.g. running for a Sheriff should require police traning and N years of experience).
- More training focus on deescalation, dialog and avoiding dangerous situations.
- Mental health screening. You don't want anyone who would become violent when in the wrong situation.
We might not be able to agree about everything, but can we at least agree that it's in everyone's best interest to have an increasing amount of the world have a generally secure, stable, unconditional personal access to food, housing, education, healthcare, and a labor market and can lives in a society with reasonable laws that they can practically obey?
Even if we don't contribute to that personally, can we at least agree to try to avoid doing things to other countries that get in the way of doing that, in really obvious ways like not randomly bombing them and pretending? Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work? As Americans, can we then really not think of a slightly more efficient way to allocate the $7.3T that the American government raises every year from tax revenue, much of which we just light on fire policing things parts of people's lives unnecessarily?
Come on. I'm sure we can. This is like taking your hand off the literal stove. I know how horrible this all looks, and it is horrible, but it's also really easy to propose a solution to it. Divest and reinvest. It could be so many flavors of divest and reinvest, and still be a good enough improvement over how things are right now that it would be the most impressive piece of legislation for probably a 100 year span of time if not 200 years. There has to be an opportunistic, ambitious K-street lobbyist or two reading this, right? Wanna take credit for bringing America out of the dark ages? Come on...you know you want to. Now's your chance.
The bar is at the floor. You could write the dirtiest honker of a bill you've ever seen that it could make the ACA look clean. As long as it achieves the right divestments (global windmill fighting) and reinvestments (domestic production infrastructure), you're on the right track. You don't even have to get it completely right the first time. Perfect is the enemy of done here. Just something major and timely, which lets you evangelize divest and reinvest. You can even rebrand it as "digital transformation" if you really want. I would promise to never judge it as management consultant grifting again.
Because if not...I don't know how long this situation will hold. Those riots are just a taste of unease to come, and eventually, the federal branches of the government will understand how much more powerless they are with dislocation of their local constituencies. Someone is going to figure out how to relocate those constituencies.
> Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work?
Being the imperial power has vast benefits, do you think Rome ruled its provinces just so they had a way to spend money? Being the global power is literally worth money. It's hard to say how much, but I'm pretty sure it's larger than your military expenses.
That said, I'd love to see the US cut back, because your benefit comes at somebody else's cost.
If the net benefit to the US is positive however, do you believe the majority of people would be happy to work more to have the same standard of living, or the majority of well-off Americans would be happy to pay European level taxes to redistribute wealth within the US? I have sincere doubts on both fronts.
From what I understand, all of these people are breaking curfew and ignoring instructions to leave the area, and in some cases are acting belligerent when confronted, and this is happening at scale.
Is the expectation that curfew is an order that should not be enforced in the strictest sense?
From what I could see on the news, parts of your country were being burned down and looted by some rogue elements who used the cover of peaceful protests to spring into action. To protect the lives and livelihoods of those affected, a curfew was imposed, which was then violated. If I lived in those areas I would have liked to see the curfew enforced as harshly as possible because if it is not enforced then I will lose the local businesses who I depend on to live in that area.
What is the expected approach to law enforcement when extreme measures like curfew orders are not obeyed, particularly during a pandemic?
A lot of these videos seem to be omitting the all-important context. In my country I would want the police to beat the ever loving expletive out of people who do go out in large crowds during a pandemic. I would want the police to use all measures available at their disposal to injure and dissuade people from breaking a curfew and unwittingly providing cover for criminals.
Perhaps in first world countries life has become soft and comfortable so there is some expectation of civil behavior from everyone in society, but clearly that has not happened in the USA and many other countries.
Many of the protests are peaceful, and a lot of anger can be easily empathized with, I can't imagine anyone who was not furious after seeing these horrible videos of police inflicted killings. Under no circumstances can I be convinced that looting and rioting is an acceptable outcome. If protesters know that their peaceful assembly is being hijacked by criminals who go out and loot and riot under the cover they provide, and they go out and protest more, then they are complicit in the rioting.
Perhaps these are cultural differences, but coming from a police where the police are infinitely more barbaric, corrupt, rude and ruthless than the USA, I find the police doing the best they can to manage the absolute mess that the citizens are creating.
You all live in a country where many police wear body cameras. That is privileged beyond anything I can hope to imagine for my country. It's weird to empathize with you when you have it so good.
Disgusting. After things settle down, in addition to all the systematic reform that will hopefully take place, I hope we can look back at these videos and put all of these officers in jail for violating the constitution and betraying their oath to protect and serve their communities.
It's finally time to put all that facial recognition tech to good use.
Is there any effort being made to archive these videos? They're actual history, and given the ephemeral nature of data on online platforms, most will probably disappear in a few years without effort to preserve them.
This seems like the perfect place to use InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (https://ipfs.io/). You can store and distribute files (including videos) using IPFS without worrying that someone could remove them. The only thing missing is a "UTube" front-end, and I'm not completely certain that there isn't already such a thing.
Maybe this type of project would be the thing that gets IPFS off the ground and exposing it to a more mainstream audience.
Suggestions? It seems like anyone that is able to provide a service to host video would be just as likely to remove them for the same pressure. P2P torrent with enough people seeding them to make it impossible to remove them is the only thing that comes to mind.
honestly... the biggest problems with the police is unions. you de-unionize the police you will see all this stop in no time. over my life i have witnessed personally numerous times when an officer should have been fired for brutality or another offense, but the union used their negotiation power and saved their job. cops know that as long as they have the power of the union legal team behind them, that 99% of the time there will be no punishment or it will be minimal.
cops are entitled because unions make them this way. take away their safety net and you seeing more terminations and less bullies and entitled people applying for the job.
Most of these videos are carefully edited to show one side of the story. Others are stories sharing only their side of the story.
Protester brutality far exceeds police brutality. Criminal brutality faaar exceeds police brutality.
Yet the extremist leftists are calling to defund the police, which leads to complete chaos and anarchy.
Pathetic reasoning from a stone-age, low-IQ perspective.
Try building an app around it with glideapps.com for easier consumption by journalists, activists, etc., I tried to add it to my drive so I could build it but your settings will not allow me to do it
You can understand why a document like this would need to be pretty locked down I hope. While you might think an app is required, I'm pretty sure just about anyone on a computer can read a spreadsheet. Also, I'd rather not need an app to present the data in a spreadsheet in a manner the developer thinks is useful. Just present the data, let the viewer consume it as they see fit.
There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average!
Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1].
There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera.
It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.
I have no idea why people discussing these protests aren't focusing more on this. How else do you capture "systemic problem" better than widespread thuggish police behavior during countrywide protests about police brutality. Of all the black civil rights activity in recent memory, this is probably one of the most powerful methods of conveying to people the gravity of the issues that black activists talk about.
[+] [-] kthejoker2|5 years ago|reply
At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.
If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|5 years ago|reply
There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera.
You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.
[+] [-] koheripbal|5 years ago|reply
Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.
This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.
I mean look at this one...
https://twitter.com/jayjanner/status/1267111893753307137
A large volume of misleading hyperbolic claims by a biased collector/poster don't get more meaningful through volume of posts.
[+] [-] throwaway_USD|5 years ago|reply
Just to play devils advocate, can't I conclude there is a problem without that problem being the "militarization" of the police force. In other words aren't I allowed to conclude there was a problem prior to the militarization of the police force, and really what we are seeing proliferation of video recordings that are now making us think these acts are new, when the reality is they happened in mass occurred prior to militarization of police...and as scary as it sounds accountability is increasing because of the video?
Then on the extreme end of devils advocate, lets say we all watched 100 videos that made us sick to our stomach...how many millions of police interactions have we not seen that might suggest the bad acts is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall data. Not unlike maybe a few bad actors that have looted or committed arson, or committed murder during the BLM protests, do those acts suggest the entire culture of BLM movement is tainted?
One of the things that really makes me sick about the George Floyd death which doesn't get a lot of attention is that the prosecutors/state attorneys originally swept it under the rug and refused to bring charges. Thank god for the video, even though it didn't stop the act, we all see the tragedy we see the victim we see the cop and attach names and faces...but who knows the names of the prosecutors who watched this video and said "no, nothing wrong here, no charges?" Nameless, faceless people protecting the officers behind the scene enabling offices to act any way they want knowing they will be protected...and maybe if we corrected that problem and officer didn't feel they could act in any fashion they wanted and receive protection perhaps we would see officers act a little differently in the streets.
[+] [-] vlads_|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand, all of the instances of so-called police brutality with context which I've seen elsewhere occur after the police calmly order the protestors to leave a particular area, or to go home because of a curphew order or something else and the protests refuse in a less-than-calm manner.
My question is this: is the police using force to manage a crowd always unjustified in your view?
[+] [-] piokoch|5 years ago|reply
Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?
[+] [-] graycat|5 years ago|reply
Eventually I saw a pattern, surprising since it was common in major cities all across the US and as if there were some single, central training materials. Apparently:
(1) Police are taught to be in control of any contact with a citizen. Recently the police have been taught to act nice initially, but, once it is clear some actual law enforcement is to be involved, be in control.
Being in control can mean that the citizen has been intimidated and made submissive so that they won't resist. Part of this is to demand that a citizen DO some little things, e.g., stand with feet apart, move back 10 feet, or tolerate being falsely accused of something, e.g., "weaving" in the road, being too close to the officer, etc. The officers are looking for things, even trivial, fake things, to object to so that they can object. It's like Captain Sobel in the 101st Airborne training in the series Band of Brothers -- "find some" infractions so that can complain about them and force the soldiers to accept being falsely accused so that they will be more compliant -- the police seem to have borrowed this tactic.
If the citizen does not look submissive, then the officer provokes a defensive reaction from the citizen so that they can arrest the citizen or threaten to arrest them.
Then, finally, maybe arrested, the citizen has been subdued and is submissive, which is what the police wanted to begin with.
(2) The police like to teach citizens, to change their attitude, and do this by hurting them, e.g., hitting them with a club, bending their arms, throwing them to the ground and putting a knee on their neck, spraying them with pepper spray, etc. They regard good police work as meting out "cruel and unusual punishment", with pain and maybe serious injury, without "due process". So, the police want to be absolute dictators on the streets.
(3) In a confrontation with a citizen, the police want some result where they successfully took some law enforcement action, a ticket or an arrest. E.g., in Atlanta, at first they didn't want merely to leave the citizen alone or, if the citizen was drunk, let him call a cab and (ii) later wanted to make sure the citizen was not able just to run away. The reaction to a citizen running away?
"Shoot them and kill them. Gee, they might 'get away'; can't permit that; that would violate due respect for the police; so, shoot the citizen." -- or some such.
(4) The expected, usual approach to an arrest is to throw the citizen to the ground, hold them down with a knee to their neck, their arms behind their back, and put on handcuffs.
From the 100 or so videos I watched, it appeared that (1)-(4) are so standard that they have been taught from some standard source. E.g., in all of that, some semi-bright guy had the idea that it was good to put a knee on a neck, and it appears that that is now standard.
Apparently part of (1)-(4) is the associated support for it from the Blue Line, e.g., police unions, Police Benevolent Associations, liability insurance cities buy for their police, the norm of police sticking together, local prosecutors, DAs, and judges who work daily with police and want to cooperate, politicians who want safe streets, etc. And at times maybe there has been more to police power, e.g., confiscating cash, shakedowns, payoffs, etc.
I'm sure that changing (1)-(4) can be done but won't be easy.
[+] [-] lazyjones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trabant00|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|5 years ago|reply
Basically you're looking at a single specific dataset, like "number of children strangled", and deciding to extrapolate from that whatever you feel like, like "a systemic and perpetual abuse of mothers and babysitters power by evil matriarchs".
Honestly, I credited this crowd with more brains. Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.
[+] [-] DeonPenny|5 years ago|reply
This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
[+] [-] spike021|5 years ago|reply
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
[+] [-] devcpp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] truthwhisperer|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] berbec|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cyberdrunk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _yt0l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supportlocal4h|5 years ago|reply
When a second one crashed, the focus quickly shifted.
It is a common attitude in aviation that even pilot error is really a systems fault. Perhaps opposing buttons are too close together, or some control requires attention to be diverted at the wrong time, or pilots are allowed to fly too many hours without adequate rest, or plenty of other things that could contribute to predictable human failure.
It seems obvious that we can predict human failure in current policing. If two incidents with a 737 lead to an indefinite grounding, what's the right number for this situation?
In the case of the airplane, grounding does not create a public safety issue. And there are, of course, many alternatives that can keep the overall system up and running in the meantime. The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
[+] [-] screye|5 years ago|reply
A new system, like the design of a whole new plane requires a lot of political will, funding and time. On the other hand, the solution people are more likely to get is minor adjustments to the design of the plane or system to make it compliant, so the 737 Max can fly again, in some capacity.
Changing the demographic of the police forces to eradicate the choke hold of trigger happy white supremacists on it, will take decades. On the other hand, laws for police accountability and monitoring can be enacted faster, and help put the police system back into place in a format that is a bit more functional.
It doesn't solve the core problem. But, it's a start. It makes it so that fewer people will face police brutality for the next few decades, while longer term efforts to reform law enforcement can take hold in the US.
> The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
a 100%. It goes deep into the American conception of good and bad, punishment and rehabilitation.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
We cannot even get the police to agree that the deaths represent failures: they will usually dig up or even fabricate anything negative about the victim to imply that he or she deserved to die. You can see this happening in the comments here too.
It is not suprising that people want to ground the police.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jairofloress|5 years ago|reply
Mexico did a while ago what so many people is asking for, disband a security corp, result? The Zetas.
Why people is ignoring statistics? People kill people of the same race.
Many of that videos is just a bunch of violent people being put as victims by others people agenda. Is like your big brother hits you, then you hit back and just you are punished.
Be careful and thoughtful in your judgments. If possible try to look back in history and search an alike situation outcome.
[+] [-] ha4fsd3fas|5 years ago|reply
Of course if all humans are law abiding citizens there would be no issue to begin with. I think every society with lower crime has significantly smaller police brutality issue with some rare exceptions like Hong Kong.
[+] [-] jennyyang|5 years ago|reply
This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime.
They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do.
We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or riots that are caused by the police themselves. I think that's fair and equitable.
[+] [-] dtagames|5 years ago|reply
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
[+] [-] lorthemar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fzeroracer|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality
[+] [-] alkonaut|5 years ago|reply
- Less immunity, and discharge without pension for blatant violations, for example being caught on camera hiding a badge, or deliberately bumping into someone to be able to argue that they were "assaulted".
- Longer police traning. A 6-12months is how long you should train to be an unarmed mall security guy. Two or three years for a policeman seems like a minimum if you want qualified officers.
- Federal overview of all police and common frameworks for what is allowed and expected by police officers.
- Only qualified policemen should be allowed to be managers anywhere in the hierarchy (e.g. running for a Sheriff should require police traning and N years of experience).
- More training focus on deescalation, dialog and avoiding dangerous situations.
- Mental health screening. You don't want anyone who would become violent when in the wrong situation.
[+] [-] yowlingcat|5 years ago|reply
Even if we don't contribute to that personally, can we at least agree to try to avoid doing things to other countries that get in the way of doing that, in really obvious ways like not randomly bombing them and pretending? Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work? As Americans, can we then really not think of a slightly more efficient way to allocate the $7.3T that the American government raises every year from tax revenue, much of which we just light on fire policing things parts of people's lives unnecessarily?
Come on. I'm sure we can. This is like taking your hand off the literal stove. I know how horrible this all looks, and it is horrible, but it's also really easy to propose a solution to it. Divest and reinvest. It could be so many flavors of divest and reinvest, and still be a good enough improvement over how things are right now that it would be the most impressive piece of legislation for probably a 100 year span of time if not 200 years. There has to be an opportunistic, ambitious K-street lobbyist or two reading this, right? Wanna take credit for bringing America out of the dark ages? Come on...you know you want to. Now's your chance.
The bar is at the floor. You could write the dirtiest honker of a bill you've ever seen that it could make the ACA look clean. As long as it achieves the right divestments (global windmill fighting) and reinvestments (domestic production infrastructure), you're on the right track. You don't even have to get it completely right the first time. Perfect is the enemy of done here. Just something major and timely, which lets you evangelize divest and reinvest. You can even rebrand it as "digital transformation" if you really want. I would promise to never judge it as management consultant grifting again.
Because if not...I don't know how long this situation will hold. Those riots are just a taste of unease to come, and eventually, the federal branches of the government will understand how much more powerless they are with dislocation of their local constituencies. Someone is going to figure out how to relocate those constituencies.
[+] [-] luckylion|5 years ago|reply
Being the imperial power has vast benefits, do you think Rome ruled its provinces just so they had a way to spend money? Being the global power is literally worth money. It's hard to say how much, but I'm pretty sure it's larger than your military expenses.
That said, I'd love to see the US cut back, because your benefit comes at somebody else's cost.
If the net benefit to the US is positive however, do you believe the majority of people would be happy to work more to have the same standard of living, or the majority of well-off Americans would be happy to pay European level taxes to redistribute wealth within the US? I have sincere doubts on both fronts.
[+] [-] fareesh|5 years ago|reply
Is the expectation that curfew is an order that should not be enforced in the strictest sense?
From what I could see on the news, parts of your country were being burned down and looted by some rogue elements who used the cover of peaceful protests to spring into action. To protect the lives and livelihoods of those affected, a curfew was imposed, which was then violated. If I lived in those areas I would have liked to see the curfew enforced as harshly as possible because if it is not enforced then I will lose the local businesses who I depend on to live in that area.
What is the expected approach to law enforcement when extreme measures like curfew orders are not obeyed, particularly during a pandemic?
A lot of these videos seem to be omitting the all-important context. In my country I would want the police to beat the ever loving expletive out of people who do go out in large crowds during a pandemic. I would want the police to use all measures available at their disposal to injure and dissuade people from breaking a curfew and unwittingly providing cover for criminals.
Perhaps in first world countries life has become soft and comfortable so there is some expectation of civil behavior from everyone in society, but clearly that has not happened in the USA and many other countries.
Many of the protests are peaceful, and a lot of anger can be easily empathized with, I can't imagine anyone who was not furious after seeing these horrible videos of police inflicted killings. Under no circumstances can I be convinced that looting and rioting is an acceptable outcome. If protesters know that their peaceful assembly is being hijacked by criminals who go out and loot and riot under the cover they provide, and they go out and protest more, then they are complicit in the rioting.
Perhaps these are cultural differences, but coming from a police where the police are infinitely more barbaric, corrupt, rude and ruthless than the USA, I find the police doing the best they can to manage the absolute mess that the citizens are creating.
You all live in a country where many police wear body cameras. That is privileged beyond anything I can hope to imagine for my country. It's weird to empathize with you when you have it so good.
[+] [-] ss3000|5 years ago|reply
It's finally time to put all that facial recognition tech to good use.
[+] [-] ardy42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1necone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Corrado|5 years ago|reply
Maybe this type of project would be the thing that gets IPFS off the ground and exposing it to a more mainstream audience.
[+] [-] dylan604|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adjkant|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/tree/master/tools...
[+] [-] thrownaway954|5 years ago|reply
cops are entitled because unions make them this way. take away their safety net and you seeing more terminations and less bullies and entitled people applying for the job.
[+] [-] hereme888|5 years ago|reply
Most of these videos are carefully edited to show one side of the story. Others are stories sharing only their side of the story.
Protester brutality far exceeds police brutality. Criminal brutality faaar exceeds police brutality. Yet the extremist leftists are calling to defund the police, which leads to complete chaos and anarchy. Pathetic reasoning from a stone-age, low-IQ perspective.
[+] [-] andreshb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcell|5 years ago|reply
Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1].
There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera.
It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.
[1] Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
[+] [-] jasonjayr|5 years ago|reply
"When you get the data into a nice, clean, dense form, stuff just falls out of it" - Saul Pwanson
[+] [-] malwrar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomasz_Papka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfj|5 years ago|reply